


hope(and eternal misery)

by twistedsky



Category: Faking It (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-11
Updated: 2014-11-11
Packaged: 2018-02-24 17:21:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2589851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twistedsky/pseuds/twistedsky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the event of a zombie apocalypse, Karma and Amy have a plan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hope(and eternal misery)

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to Sam(bisexualkarmaashcroft on tumblr).
> 
> Warnings for the obvious zombie-related issues--violence, death, the usual. This fic also includes a lot of zombie cliches, because I'm a silly billy goose.

In the event of a zombie apocalypse, Karma and Amy have a plan.

But most people have zombie apocalypse plans—casually spoken, with reasonably intellectual thought put into them, but not particularly likely to work in the event of an actual zombie apocalypse. That’s what happens when there are a bazillion movies and television shows about zombies.

No one expects the zombie apocalypse to actually _happen_ though. Or, at least, Amy and Karma didn't.

They’re caught on some nonsense school camping trip to ‘commune with nature’ of all things—typical of Hester High, of course, and maybe even a good thing considering that most of the people in their hometown get caught unaware by the massive flood of zombies from the city, and they get  _slaughtered._

They're heading back from the campsite when they see the traffic, and then they hear the screams, and everything changes.

~~

The group splinters quickly, and then it’s just ten of them—Amy, Karma, Theo, Liam, Shane, Lauren, Oliver, Lauren’s two little friends Leila and Lizbeth(Elizabeth, she says, but Lauren continues not to listen), and some random kid Amy doesn’t actually know who claims his name is Adam.

Lauren suggests quite smartly that they raid her daddy’s gun collection, and so they head back home to see the streets crawling with critters. It's only a few miles, but there's a small army of undead creatures between them and their homes.

Amy takes the slim jim she’s been holding since she saw someone get attacked by a _zombie_ of all things and starts slamming it into zombie brains.

It’s disgusting.

Shane starts panicking a few minutes in to the walk, screaming about how they’re all going to die, but then _thankfully_  Lauren slaps him.

If it hadn't been Lauren, it would have been her, Amy thinks, because they do not have time for this.

“Hey!”

“Get it the fuck together,” Lauren hisses, brandishing her hunting knife. “Or die.”

Shane just stares at her blankly, and while Amy, Lauren and Theo kill the zombies as they try to walk to(and then through) town, the rest of them just walk silently.

“Okay,” Shane says finally. “I got it.”

The others don’t get a chance to panic. If you panic, you die.

Amy looks at Oliver, who is holding one of the little metal pipes from one of their camping tents, which are now carefully packed away in Theo and Liam’s backpacks, and she wonders if he can kill with it. She wonders if he can kill at all, to be honest, but she hadn’t had much of a choice, and neither does he.

She’d seen someone die in front of her, attacked by a zombie, and then Lauren had jabbed her hunting knife into its eye when it came for them, and then Amy had grabbed her slim jim, trying to sharpen its already pointy, ragged edge into something a bit more dangerous, and then a minute later it was inside of a zombie’s head.

There’s not much time for adjustment, Amy thinks.

~~

They hit some locations Lauren knows of to get more ammo, and they just start collecting weapons.

They try out a museum, and Karma picks up an ax, swinging it around. “Hey, hey, be careful with that,” Liam says with a slight smile.

Karma looks at him and tries to summon up feelings of love, but she can’t. All she feels is despair.

“We need to get away from cities, that’s what they did in the Walking Dead,” Amy says, and they all seem to agree.

More people, more zombies.

“This is fucked up,” Theo says, shaking his head, brandishing a sword, slicing it through the air. “I think I’d prefer a gun,” he says honestly.

“You have to prefer both,” Lauren tells him. “Sometimes we’re going to have to be quiet, and sometimes it won’t matter. And eventually we’ll run out of bullets no matter what.”

“We’re lucky they aren’t fast zombies,” Liam says, and Amy nods. 

“We are. And we really need to find more food.” Amy sighs and considers a crossbow. “I always liked when we played with the crossbows in gym.”

“At least you know how to shoot,” Lauren points out. “That’s what matters now.”

That, she means, is how you prove your worth at the end of the world.

Amy understands that much.

~~

They have to travel out of town on foot at first, because everything is too much of a disaster to get around otherwise.

With the ten of them they manage to move forward in a big sort of clump, people on every side protecting the integrity of the group. Or, at least that's the theory behind it.

Amy wonders if it’s settled in for the rest of them, if they realize what’s really happening, if they’ve accepted it yet.

She doesn't let herself really think about it too much, because her mother is likely dead, and chances are they'll all soon follow, and that's just  _a lot_ to deal with, okay?

She takes her machete and slices it through a zombie’s head, then cleans it off on the rough towel she’d grabbed for this very purpose. It doesn’t hurt to think ahead, she thinks.

Lauren has the crossbow, because she’s better suited to it, and the rest of them have a collection of makeshift and actual weapons that must put most other little survival groups to shame.

They escape the mayhem and then it’s time to get a car.

They all stare at a group of them at the side of the road with zombies milling around. They take them out first, then just stand there waiting.

“Anyone think they might have just left the keys in the cars?” Leila asks meekly. “Maybe we’re lucky.”

“It’s the end of the world, dude. There’s no such thing as lucky anymore,” Theo says, and Amy decides that her stepsister’s boyfriend is her favorite.

She’d broken up with _her_ girlfriend only a month before, and she has to wonder what Reagan’s up to now. She’s either dead or killing at this point, and so she’s not any better off than they are, Amy decides, pushing the thought out of her mind.

She likes the machete a lot, though she’s kind of jealous that Shane has a katana like Michonne from the Walking Dead. Apparently he’s had fencing lessons though, which means he actually knows how to use at  least _some_ kind of an actual sword.

Amy doesn’t know how to use her machete, not really, but she’s figuring it out.

She looks toward Karma and Liam, who are close enough that they look like they might be merging together in fear, and she feels her heart clench in her chest.

No, she thinks, this is neither the time nor place, and she is over that.

She’s moved on.

She watches Oliver try to teach them all how to hotwire a car, and then looks up to the sky. There’s not much choice anymore.

~~

She gets used to the violence and bloodshed.

Amy doesn’t know how, but somehow it becomes normal. It’s like what they say—even the most perverse, horrifying, _awful_ things can start to feel normal.

She has trouble sleeping now, and not just because there’s always the chance that zombies will overrun their little campsites.

They consider heading to the ocean, but instead they head north.

The last thing they want is to end up without an escape route.

They sort of just wander around in circles, though to be fair she has no idea where they even are half the time.

They want to be in the middle of nowhere, because that at least _might_ be safe.

Might is better than definitely not, which is often a descriptor for things nowadays.

~~

Karma curls up against Liam’s side the first night, and says nothing, but for some reason the next night she’s next to Amy, holding her hand and practically spooning her.

Amy doesn’t ask why. At night, Karma’s curled against her side, and during the day she won’t step away from Liam most days.

Amy doesn’t worry about that. There’s a lot of strange things now—such darkness and death inflicted upon the world so earnestly, she thinks. Sounds a bit like hellfire and damnation, except they’re still all stuck here, trying to stay alive.

This, she thinks, is hell on earth.

~~

They lose Adam on a supply run a month in. He’s a nervous fellow, even more nervous than Oliver, which Amy hadn’t thought possible.

Some part of _clear the room before you lower your weapon_ seems to have escaped his understanding, so Amy thinks he deserves what he gets. 

They weren’t that attached to him anyway.

She sees Karma crying and Lauren sharpening herself extra makeshift arrows with a deadly look in her eyes. Or maybe they were.

She closes her eyes and tries to breathe, but closing her eyes scares her now, and she opens them back up, and they’re still safe.

Safe, she thinks. Yeah right.

Lauren had shot him in the head once he’d been bitten, completely swarmed by three zombies with their hands and mouths digging into his organs, trying to give him some sort of mercy.

Amy hopes Lauren will do the same for her if the time comes.

~~

They train constantly—shooting, slicing heads off, figuring out the best way to get a weapon into a zombie’s head with minimal opportunity for the zombie to get its teeth into their skin.

They hole up in a cabin in the middle of nowhere for a week or two at one point, and they even put barbed wire around the perimeter, trying to give themselves a little breathing room.

Thank god for zombie media, Amy smiles to herself. They’d probably be dead without it.

At that thought, she misses _music_.

She misses everything already, and she wonders when the feeling goes away. She wonders when she’ll stop missing _life_.

This, this is not life, this is the undead walking and the living running for their lives, killing every single day.

Amy sits in the bathroom of the little cabin and breathes.

The plumbing doesn’t work, so it’s not like it matters if she stays in there for hours at a time, just staring at herself in the mirror, trying to figure out who she is.

Lauren counts her zombie conquests. She keeps the number close to her, counting aloud as she kills.

It’s a little morbid, and Amy considers doing it too, but the faces are still _there_ , she thinks, even if the souls aren’t, and she can’t focus on the deaths like that. She needs to focus on living.

She leans against the tiled bathroom wall and stretches out her legs in the bathtub.

This is her favorite place—bathroom window boarded up, just in case, and the bathroom door shut, her weapons all at the ready.

She doesn’t even take off the cute jacket she stole from a closet in some house they stayed at for a few hours once. She doesn’t let herself relax anymore.

She hears a knock at the door, and she raises her weapon immediately.

“It’s me,” Karma says.

“Come in,” she says, but only as loud as she must in order to be heard.

They don’t laugh anymore, or make loud noises, because who knows what that might attract?

Karma opens the door and walks in, her ax in hand.

Amy's not the only one afraid of not having a weapon in hand.

“Hey,” Karma says, and Amy smiles slightly.

Her skin is tight, and it feels fake, but it’s the best she has to offer.

“Hey you,” Amy says back, and Karma shuts the door behind herself, sitting down alongside the bathtub, facing Amy. “How was the hunt?”

Karma frowns, and then sighs. “We found a rabbit and a squirrel, which was nice.”

“That’s good to hear.” It is. Any vegetarians in the group have long since given up on such idealistic principles. You eat what you have, or you die.

“Yeah. Theo and Oliver got back from the hill though.” The hill near the cabin gives a pretty good vantage point, which is an extra benefit of staying here. The cabin is small, and they all sleep in a group on the floor, except the lucky two whose turn it is to sleep on the bed, but it’s relatively safe.

“What’s wrong?” Amy asks, because Karma is too easy for her to read and it's clear something is wrong, so she snaps back to high alert. Low alert was nice, she thinks, but it never lasts.

Nothing ever lasts anymore. Except the death, and the killing, that is.

Karma is reluctant to say whatever it is, which means it’s definitely bad. And, of course, it is. “There’s a huge group of them coming our way. Gigantic. A horde. ”

“We have to go,” Amy concludes, because that’s bad. “How long?”

“We have a few hours to get out of the way, so it’s time to go.” Karma sighs and leans her side against the bath tub.

Amy reaches out and grabs her hand, squeezing it, as if that can possibly provide the kind of comfort she needs right now.

They sit there for a moment, breathing in and out, and enjoying the last moments of almost safety until they hear a knock at the door, and it’s time to get ready to go again, just like it always is.

~~

They don’t get away as smoothly as they’d like, and they run into a small arm of the swarm, and it’s all chaos and running and slashing weapons through the air.

They are bloody and exhausted by the time they come across a small town and hole up in the church, only having to take out a handful in the building. It’s sturdy enough, and there are no fancy glass windows, and so they collapse in the hall, which by the grace of the gods is full of food—donations, they’re guessing, but they’re needy enough.

They’re mourning, too, because they’re down by two, and their nine are now seven.

Lizbeth had sprained her ankle, and Leila had insisted on trying to help her along, screaming out that she would _not_ leave her behind, and so she hadn’t, and they’d both been completely overwhelmed, even as Leila had tried to defend them both.

Amy had seen Lauren look back at a slight distance and shoot them both dead in the head. Mercy, she thinks. Mercy.

Now, they salute their fallen comrades and hope for the best, because the horde is travelling parallel to this little town, and some zombies will certainly stumble through.

Amy eats canned peaches and wonders what happens if they keep surviving. At some point, she thinks, most of the food will be expired or gone, and the wildlife will have been picked off by human and zombie alike and—she freezes, a peach midway to her mouth, her fork still in the air, and she frowns.

“What?” Lauren bites out. She’s in a remarkably good mood considering that her two best friends are now dead.

At least she’s talking, Amy thinks to herself, but outwardly—“I’m fine,” she says, “Just thinking.”

“Well, can you think a little more quietly? Some of us have important things to worry about, and people to mourn.”

“Lauren,” Theo says, reaching out a hand to put on her shoulder, but she shrugs away from it.

Amy narrows her eyes at them, and wonders if there’s any love between them still, or if they’ve completely fallen out of love in the wake of the total devastation of their lives.

From the look that Lauren gives Theo at that moment, Amy is guessing that the latter is closer to the truth.

Who has the time to love in the midst of the zombie apocalypse?

She turns to Shane, who is so quiet now all of the time, and she wonders if _he’s_ lonely too. Oliver seems mostly preoccupied with smartening up their survival plan, and maybe that’s enough for him.

She’d ask Karma what the point of continuing to fight and survive is, but she’s guessing that Karma will just say _Liam_ , or something along those lines, and she can’t take that anymore.

She finishes her peaches, and tosses the can in a trash pile before curling up on a church bench and closing her eyes.

Lauren’s on watch first, which makes them all the safest she can possibly hope for, and now is the time to sleep.

Karma settles in front of her head, laying on her stomach—her head facing Amy, her legs facing away, and Amy is sure she’s glad that church benches are so long.

The velvety red fabric is a bit itchy, but not too bad.

Amy has her machete in one hand, and Karma grabs the empty one.

“Amy?” she whispers softly. Amy lifts her head up to look around, and notes that everyone else is far enough to not hear them, and she plops her head back down and sighs.

“Yeah?”

“I’m glad I still have you.”

Amy’s startled by that. “Oh, Karma. I’m glad I still have you too.”

Amy can hear Karma’s smile in her next words. “Good,” Karma says, “My other options for best friends in this group are kind of shitty.”

“Kind of?” Amy teases, settling into a happy feeling. Maybe she’ll manage to get a good night’s sleep for once.

Karma could ruin this moment and mention Liam, because he’s not especially shitty(at least, not according to her, and Amy kind of likes him in a weird sort of way, and they have a quasi-friendship going on), but she doesn’t, and the moment swells on.

For a moment, Amy almost forgets about all of the bad things in the world, and she just enjoys holding her best friend’s hand on a mildly comfortable church bench.

There are worse things, after all.

~~

It’s been four months, and there’s no change.

There’s no hope, Amy thinks.

There’s no point.

~~

Amy catches Theo and Shane screwing on a bed in a house they stop at in their general search for safe haven, and just shrugs her way right out of that bedroom.

There are some things she definitely doesn’t need to know, even now.

Amy wanders to the living room, where Lauren is sitting. Amy sits down next to her and, without giving anything away, attempts to gather information, but Lauren just gives her a withering look, tells her to mind her fucking business, and then sighs.

Amy reaches out a hand to try to comfort her, then pulls back.

Instead they sit quietly, and Lauren cleans her knives. When she’s ready, she speaks.  “I ended things a week into this thing,” Lauren admits, which explains a lot. “It didn’t feel right anymore.”

“I can understand that, things have changed. But don’t you ever feel lonely?” Amy does, sometimes, even though she has the group, and even though she has Amy. She finds that zombies remind her of her mortality, which makes her stressed, and maybe even sad sometimes, and that just reminds her of how small the world is—and of how big it is, filled to its brim with death and desolation.

“I don’t feel lonely,” Lauren says with a shrug. “I don’t feel anything at all.”

“Then why do you keep going?” Amy asks, because she’s not sure why _she_ even does. “Why even bother at all?”

Lauren looks up at her like she’s dimwitted, and matter of factly asks, “What else is there?” but it sounds a lot more like  _there's nothing else left._

Amy doesn’t have an answer for her question—at least, not one other than _death_ or zombiehood, and so she stays quiet and ponders Lauren’s words.

~~

They don’t talk to other survivors unless they absolutely have to, and in most cases there’s even a way around that.

People are not trustworthy in the best of circumstances, and Amy saw the fifth season of The Walking Dead, so she _remembers_ the bit about the cannibals, okay?

Creepy,  skeevy business she thinks with a shiver.

This is why she’d been in favor of getting out of Texas as quickly as possible, because they tend to have a lot of guns and very short tempers, and there’s no need to add to the list of stressful as fuck things they have to worry about on a regular basis, right?

“Do you think zombies like rain?” she asks. “Maybe we could try going somewhere where zombies just don’t like to be?”

“How would we know where zombies like to be?” Lauren points out with a roll of her eyes.

“Process of elimination,” Oliver helpfully suggests. Amy knew she liked him for a reason.

“Exactly,” Amy says.

“But we could end up somewhere bad trying to just figure stuff out,” Liam points out, and that’s also a good point.

“It’s a crapshoot either way,” Karma puts in, and this isn’t really getting them anywhere.

“Does anyone have any better ideas?” Shane asks, finally speaking up. Amy doesn’t feel like his friend anymore. She can’t explain it. Nothing besides the end of the world has happened, and it’s not like she doesn’t have his back, but he’s so quiet and contained, and she doesn’t _know_ him anymore. It adds to the whole loneliness problem she has.

“We could get a radio, and see if they’re still broadcasting automatic messages, or if there’s anything new. Maybe there’s another safe haven.” Amy really is grateful for Oliver.

“Yeah, and maybe it’ll actually be _safe,_ ” Lauren says with a laugh, and it’s not an enjoyable sound to hear.

There have been safe havens before, and the few travelers they’d interacted with had called them zombie feeding grounds.

There is no hope, one of the women had said. “But I’m not living for hope anymore,” she’d said, shrugging her shoulders.

Amy had wanted to ask what she was living for, but then it had been time to go, and they’d left the woman to her drinking.

Bars are still important in the midst of the zombie apocalypse, but they don’t drink.

Drinking gets people killed—though for some people, the only thing that keeps them alive is the numbing that comes with it.

Their group doesn’t drink because they’d all made bad enough decisions under the influence of alcohol _before_ they had to worry about zombies and life and death situations.

They’re very insular, and very protective of their own, and Amy appreciates that, but sometimes she wonders if they should join up with other groups.

It doesn’t take much interaction with those other groups to remind her of why they haven’t though.

The world’s a scary place, and you can only trust yourself. Others, she thinks, must be vetted carefully.

She looks around at her group, and she wonders how much she trusts them.

Lauren, oddly enough, she trusts the most, with Karma second, and the others all falling in far behind. Shane is sometimes sluggish and unpredictable, and while Oliver is smart, and he can be clever with his weapons, he sometimes hesitates, and one day that’s going to get him or someone else killed. Liam is solid, she thinks, and Theo is strong and consistent.

She trusts them, she thinks, as much as she can.

~~

She’s not trying to _do_ anything, per say, but she picks up gifts for Karma on the smaller supply trips that don’t involve the full group.

It’s not like she’s trying to win her over, because she’s long since acknowledged that there’s no hope on that front, but there is _Karma_.

Amy needs Karma now, more than ever before. She is one of the few things, and the most important one at that, that get Amy through the day.

Protect Karma, get Karma the jelly beans, hold Karma’s hand, but don’t _love_ Karma, no, not like that, not anymore.

Amy has it all worked out.

~~

There’s a _town_. It's called Heaven, which, okay, is a little on the nose in Amy's opinion. 

It’s safe from zombies, at least as far as they can tell, and it has huge walls and fortification, and it isn’t so big that it’ll draw too much attention, so it’s perfect.

They wander into it by chance, and after an introduction(and _hours-_ long individual grilling sessions) from the welcoming committee, they’re taken somewhere to sleep.

“It’s safe here,” the people say. “You can stay as long as you take part in the community. Do your share, and that’s most of what we ask.”

There’s more, they say, but there’s always more.

They get their own rooms, which unnerves Amy, who is used to at least one other person in the room with her, if not the entire group, or no room at all.

This, however, is strange.

She tries not to think about the worst of things—like every safe haven on every zombie television show and in every zombie movie. Someone always screws stuff up, or there’s always something suspect going on.

She tries to put this into words when they all meet to decide if they want to try to stay, but most of the others don’t seem to see her point. “But none of that is real. This is real life,” Karma points out. “It could be safe here. We can’t say no to that.”

“Sure we can,” Lauren says, and Amy is grateful for _her_ , at least.

“I want to stay,” Shane says, and Liam and Theo agree.

Oliver is more reluctant, because his urge to protect himself is warring with his urge to be skeptical and logical about everything, and Karma obviously wants to stay, which makes it 4-2, with one undecided, so there’s no chance that they can turn this thing around even if they convince Oliver to vote with them, Amy realizes.

She and Lauren could leave without their friends, but she’s not sure they’re even equipped to live as a pair. It’s too dangerous, she realizes.

They could try, of course.

Amy is seriously considering it, but then she takes one look at Karma’s face, which screams _stay, please, for me_ , and she stays.

Lauren does too, though Amy doesn’t quite know why. “Don’t ask me,” Lauren tells her, and Amy just shakes her head.

~~

For the first week or so, Karma still comes to her and sleeps cuddled up next to her at night.

Amy finds solace in that, but then suddenly it stops without warning, and she’s back to sleeping with Liam.

Amy doesn’t ask why, she doesn’t need to. Karma has found peace, and so she just doesn’t need whatever she was getting from Amy anymore.

This is when the nightmares start. Amy wakes up drenched in sweat, terror-stricken, searching her arms for bites or scratches, and full of visions of zombies consuming her, and her team, and _Karma_.

Amy doesn’t mention them to anyone, because what would she say? She’s adjusting, she thinks. It’s the zombie apocalypse, and these things just take time. She should be grateful she’s not waking up screaming like some people.

~~

Liam and Theo are chopping wood, and Amy and some member of the community are watching their backs, because they’re outside of the confines of the walls.

It’s weird, Amy thinks.

It feels like how things were before, except now there are more people, and they’re supposed to be safe.

She doesn’t _feel_ safe.

She looks through the trees and sees a single zombie, and makes eye contact with the other guy—she can’t actually remember his name—and nods her head toward it.

He nods, and she takes off to take it out, then wipes her weapon off before she sees that there are more coming. It’s a group of maybe ten to twelve, and she definitely doesn’t want to take _that_ on by herself unless she absolutely has to, so she heads back and warns the others.

They load up the wheelbarrows and start back.

Amy stays near the back with Liam while Theo and the . . . other guy take up the front.

She kind of likes Liam, she supposes, and she wouldn’t let him die even if Karma didn’t love him.

She loves Karma, after all, and Karma loves Liam, and even though she can be jealous, she’s not _evil_.

She feels protective over him because of this, she supposes.

It’s not like anyone is going to die today, but it doesn’t hurt to be extra vigilant.

She doesn’t think overly much about the way she feels about Karma these days.

She’s made her choice every day since the first time, and it’s always Liam.

Amy accepts that, she does, but sometimes she wonders if she’ll ever move on, if that part of her heart will ever cease to want Karma, to _love_ Karma.

Even when she was with Reagan, her heart never really fully unclenched from wanting Karma, and it’s just so _frustrating_ , she thinks.

Sometimes the zombie apocalypse is a good thing, because it lets her take her mind off of that. When survival is your primary concern, other stuff generally fades away into the background.

At least, this is what she tries to believe.

“So, how are you adjusting?” Liam asks, and Amy looks to him and shrugs.

“Okay, I guess. It’s strange. We actually have time to clean our clothes and pretend to be normal people. What about you?”

“It’s fine,” Liam says. “Karma is . . . happy. That helps.”

“It does,” Amy agrees. “She’s not cut out for the tension of being constantly on the run.”

“None of us are,” Liam says, and that’s true enough, she supposes.

“Some of us less so than others,” Amy acknowledges. “I’m okay.”

“Really? I’m not.”

They reach the edge of the community, and they wait for the gate to open.

“I’m not either,” Amy admits quietly. “I just don’t know how to pretend to be anything else anymore.”

“You should—“ Liam hesitates. “It’s better when you’re not alone,” he says softly. “And I wouldn’t want to pressure you or anything, but there are people, maybe you can find someone.”

“That’s actually really nice of you to say,” Amy says, scrunching up her nose. “A little bit nosy and totally none of your business, but it’s nice of you to care.”

“It’s not just because of Karma,” Liam assures her. “I know that we’re over that, it’s just—you seem lonely sometimes. So do Lauren and Oliver. It’s hard.”

Amy nods her head, and they head inside to put the wood away.

Amy can’t imagine falling in love with anyone anymore. Maybe before this she would have managed if she’d just had _time_ , but now? Now everything is a mess, and even though being here makes things less of a mess, it’s still . . . wrong.

~~

Lauren is strange now that they’ve found what resembles civilization again.

Before, she was so quiet and violent and _angry_. She’d become hard, sharpened to a point so quickly that Amy swore she’d been waiting for the world to go to shit her entire life.

Now though, she’s still quiet, like she’s always expecting things to go bad again.

She doesn’t look like she’s getting any sleep—at least Amy is, even though she still sleeps with her weapons at the ready and the nightmares are screwing with her head.

She’s scared, even now.

Karma feels safe, Amy can tell. Karma has started wearing dresses she’d gotten from some nice little villager, and she smiles, and she looks _bright_.

Amy doesn’t dare take that away from her, but she’s kind of with Lauren—she’s waiting for all of this to fall apart.

And it does, eventually.

~~

It ends with fire and zombies everywhere.

Amy’s only thoughts are _Lauren_ and _Karma(_ not exactly in that order, but no one can possibly be surprised by that), and so she seeks them out, Liam’s there too, but the rest of their group is nowhere to be found.

Shane and Theo are gone as far as they can tell, and hopefully they've escaped somewhere, but sadly Oliver is not so lucky.

He’s gurgling blood on the ground, and Amy squats down next to him quickly and smiles slightly. “It’s okay, Oliver,” and she ends his life, and later, after Karma grabs her arm and drags her away, she finds that she’d been crying.

It’s silly and sentimental, she tells herself. _Move on_.

They face the opportunity to group up with others, or try to find Theo or Shane, but the fire is huge, and they’re surrounded and so they just leave.

They need to get as far away as possible.

~~

They should have known better than to hope. Karma is very mopey now, and Liam just quietly sits there by her side, and Lauren is even more vicious than before, because there are so few of them, and they’re _scared._

It’s more dangerous now, somehow, or at least it feels like it.

Karma comes over to her to fall asleep, and Amy fights a smile.

~~

There’s something going on between Karma and Liam, and Amy’s curious, though she tries not to be.

Things are colder now, and Karma doesn’t talk about it—when would they, after all? Half the time they’re on the move, or in the group, and it’s dangerous to wander off on your own.

On occasion, they spend the night in a car or a mildly safe house, but nothing is ever safe, they know.

“Maybe we should strap ourselves to a tree,” Karma suggests. “Like Katniss from the Hunger Games.”

“It’s an idea,” Amy says, though she’s not sure if it would actually work. She can’t really _climb_ all that well, so.

Maybe not the best plan.

“That’s a terrible idea,” Lauren says, no filter as usual. “None of you can do good enough knots to avoid ending up falling and dying, and then what’s the point of that?”

“You could teach us,” Liam points out, and Lauren sends him a scathing glance.

“I don’t think you’d learn,” Lauren says, and then she goes back to sharpening the knives she keeps strapped to her legs.

Amy and Karma share a smile, and Amy just shrugs. “I guess we need a new plan.”

“I guess we do,” Karma says. “Maybe we can genetically engineer ourselves some wings.”

“Ooh, I like the idea, but I’m not sure I know enough about any kind of science to manage it.” 

“Me neither,” Karma says. “But if we could, it would be perfect. We could fly away to another place—“ Karma brightens up while she thinks of this magical world where they don’t have to worry about zombies and death and loneliness, and Amy can read it all over face.

“Maybe we should just skip the wings and get ourselves a spaceship and find a new planet.”

“I like that idea,” Liam pipes up, and Amy and Karma turn to him, and then back to each other, because his input was not asked for, but okay.

“Me too,” Lauren says. “But it’s not going to happen, so get over it.”

Amy has no idea what the point of trying to live is anymore, except _Karma_ , of course, but she can’t exactly say that.

“Maybe we should get protective bubbles,” Amy suggests.

“Like the bubble boy!” Karma says, and Amy nods. “Or hamster balls.”

"Maybe something that isn't so fucking stupid," Lauren mutters, but Amy and Karma ignore her.

“Or maybe you two could try for something more realistic?” Liam puts in.

Amy snorts, and Karma laughs. “I don’t think so,” Karma says. “It’s much more fun this way.”

“I agree,” Amy says, and things aren’t so bad, she supposes.

~~

 “I miss malls,” Lauren says one day.

“Me too,” Karma agrees. “Shopping, live people, fast food.”

“Oh my god, fast food,” Amy says, moaning slightly. “French fries.”

“Pizza,” Liam puts in.

“Pizza,” Karma nods, agreeing. “Movies.”

“Are we just listing off things we miss now?” Lauren asks.

“Yes,” Amy and Karma say in unison. Lauren shrugs, because okay, she did start this.

“Ice cream,” Amy says, and they all agree, yes.

“I miss having real clothing choices,” Lauren says, and Karma nods her head in agreement.

“Cute dresses,” Karma sighs. “Bright colors. Unreasonable shoes.”

“Oh, my favorite,” Lauren agrees, sounding wistful.

Amy just shakes her head. “I miss air conditioning.”

“Oh my god,” Karma says, and Lauren and Liam groan.

“Indoor plumbing,” Liam says, and Amy thinks about toilet paper and almost cries.

Amy spots a zombie and sighs, indicating to the others that she has it, and she walks over quickly, decapitating it, and then crunching down her left boot into its head.

She really loves those boots, she thinks. “A zombie-less world,” Amy says, walking back to the group. “Think we’ll ever see one again?”

This, apparently, serves only to somber up the entire group, and suddenly—“I miss my dad,” Lauren says, and _nope_ , that was definitely the wrong thing to say.

Amy thinks about her mom, and then tries really hard not to.

The world keeps spinning.

~~

Here’s the thing about a zombie apocalypse: at some point you have to wonder if there really _is_ a point.

If zombies will inherit the earth, and humanity dies out a little more with every day, then why bother?

It’s easy for Amy to turn to Karma and look at that bright red hair and those soft lips and think _yes, for her_ , but most people don’t have Karma to keep them steady.

She’s not sure what it means on a global level.

Maybe there’s a group of scientists somewhere trying to come up with a cure, or maybe they’re trying to at least find a way to mass-kill the zombies, but hey, Amy would settle for either/or at this point, she’s not picky.

She doesn’t know how the people on the zombie shows did it—beyond the fact that they didn’t actually exist, of course, and damn she misses television. Life is depressing without hope.

She can’t spend years living like this, and she certainly can’t manage anything more than that.

She grabs a book the next time they’re in someone’s house—some copy of Pride and Prejudice, which is not her favorite book, but everything else is hella Russian, and she just doesn’t have the patience for War and Peace.

And, more importantly, she’s never seen a movie version of War and Peace, but she _can_ close her eyes and try to remember what Elizabeth and Darcy looked like when they were falling in love. Karma made her watch that movie, and maybe it wasn't as terrible as she'd made it out to be.

Karma smiles when she sees the book and asks if she can borrow it, and Amy hands it over without hesitation, not even bothering to mark her spot, and Karma kisses her cheek before running off to read it.

Maybe next time she’ll go for some YA Lit—maybe a little Harry Potter or Twilight.

~~

Karma curls up on a queen-sized bed with Amy, and they just lie on their sides, staring at each other. It's a reasonably well-protected house in the middle of nowhere, with a pretty solid gate that goes around the entire estate, which is pretty damn close to safe, at least.

“Why don’t you sleep with Liam?” she asks, since she's been wondering about it for a while.

Karma frowns, and then bites her lip nervously. “I feel safer with you. I feel _better_ with you.”

“Oh,” Amy says, and she fights the desire to dig in deeply. She doesn’t need to know anything more, not really.

This torture, she thinks, is exquisite. It makes her feel oddly intellectual to think of it like that, even though it’s more like someone stabbed a rusted knife in her chest and they’re just turning it around and around and around.

Karma reaches out and grabs her hand, and Amy lets her, even though it only really hurts her. But it hurts so _good_ , sigh.

She closes her eyes, and just enjoys the moment.

“Amy?” Karma says softly, and Amy’s eyes immediately flutter open.

“Yeah?”

Karma looks serious, like she’s worried about something, or—“Can I try something?”

“What?” Amy frowns, a little unsure.

Karma flushes red, and Amy just nods. “Just—something, okay?”

“Yeah, sure.”

It feels like it takes an eternity for Karma to scoot and then lean closer and closer toward her until suddenly they’re nose to nose, and Amy’s eyes close again, and Karma’s _kissing_ her, and oh yeah, this is even better than she remembers.

Her heart is always on her shoulder with Karma, and it’s too painful to think about, but oh god, she _loves_ her with everything that she is, and everything that she’ll ever be.

When they pull apart, Amy can’t help herself, “What about Liam?”

Karma looks down, “We’re not in a good place, Amy. We aren’t—I don’t want to be with him anymore.”

“Karma—“ Amy can’t get hopeful, she _can’t_. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Karma says. “I should have done this before, but I’ve just been pretending that I’m okay, that everything is okay, but it’s _not_. The only person who makes me feel better about all of this is _you_.”

“I love you,” Amy says, and her voice doesn’t break, it’s firm and clear, and she’s proud of herself for that.

Karma reaches out a hand to caress the side of Amy’s face, and Amy turns her head into it.

“I love you too, Amy. I’m glad—I’m glad that you’re here with me.”

“Ditto,” Amy says, smiling through what she thinks are happy tears.

Life is not okay at all—there’s death around every corner, and it’s the fucking zombie apocalypse and the _end of the world_ , but Karma is here, and she loves _Amy_ , and maybe that’s enough, maybe that’s all she needs.


End file.
